Dudley Randall Center for Print Culture
The Dudley Randall Center for Print Culture was established in October 2000 under the leadership and vision of Hugh Culik, professor, University of Detroit Mercy Department of English, and with a generous grant from the McGregor Fund, a foundation that supports programs in education and human services in southeast Michigan.
Naming the Center after Dudley Randall reflects not only our great respect for a poet and a publisher who literally transformed the face of American Literature, but also, our commitment to continuing his vision of the written word as a living art form intimately connected to community and to self-determination. It also demonstrates our commitment to continuing his vision of publishing as a vehicle for building relationships and for promoting cultural critique. Dudley Randall was a great inspiration to generations of writers, readers and community activists. We are proud to join the other individuals and institutions that continue his legacy.
Pedagogy
Publishing extraordinary projects is only one of our objectives; equally important to the Center is our placement of students at the heart of our publishing process and agenda. Through student editorships with our various publications and Detroit Mercy English department courses in academic and electronic publishing, Detroit Mercy students gain skills and experience that will enable them to pursue a wide variety of academic and publishing fields. Such a commitment to student involvement and development sets the Center and UDM Press apart from other academic enterprises, and follows in the long tradition at University of Detroit Mercy of viewing pedagogy and scholarship as intimately intertwined.
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Mission and Projects
The philosophy of the Center is based on the elimination of the boundaries traditionally drawn in the field of publishing between electronic and print projects, and between academic, student and community scholars and writers.
In addition to publishing [sic], Detroit Mercy’s student arts journal; and the Howling Wolf creative writing chapbook series, the Center also publishes award-winning original scholarly research, multimedia projects and creative works by University of Detroit Mercy and Detroit authors. These larger projects are published under the imprint of the University of Detroit Mercy Press, and in collaboration with other presses in the Detroit and Windsor areas.
Past Center projects include:
A Different Image: The Legacy of Broadside Press | An Anthology.
This critical anthology was produced in collaboration with Broadside Press. The text features the work of acclaimed twentieth-century poets Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, Haki Madhubuti, Dudley Randall and Sonia Sanchez. Introducing each author's collection of poems are essays that present the political, cultural and aesthetic contexts of each poets contributions to the Black Arts and Black consciousness movements. A Different Image casts a new light on this exceedingly valuable literary tradition and articulates the connections between the poetry of the Black consciousness era and today's flourishing performance poetry movement. It will acquaint contemporary poets and students with the literary gold mine of their Broadside predecessors. A CD featuring selected readings from each poet's work accompanies the text. Distributed by Wayne State University Press. A Different Image was selected for inclusion on the 2005 list of Michigan Notable Books.
Solitude of Five Black Moons, by Aurora Harris
Aurora Harris had the very good fortune to be born and raised in a truly international and multicultural family in Detroit. Her mother’s people are Filipinos, descendants of the former colonial elite; her father’s kinfolk are descendants of African American sharecroppers from Mississippi. She was inducted into Catholicism by her mother and into Islam by her father. Shaped by this rich cultural complexity, she derived a profound sense of the strivings common to all people, of what it means to be marginalized culturally and racially, of the necessity to strive for social justice. Such themes pervade the brilliant poetry of Solitude of Five Black Moons, winner of the PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Multicultural Award for Excellence in Literature, 2012. This book of poetry was produced in collaboration with Broadside Press and distributed by Wayne State University Press.
Community
Contact Information
Rosemary Weatherston, Ph.D.
Director
Email: weatherr@udmercy.edu
Phone: 313-993-1083
The Dudley Randall Center for Print Culture
University of Detroit Mercy
4001 W. McNichols Road
P.O. Box 19900
Detroit, MI 48219-0900
Fax: 313-993-1166